some months ago, I decided myself to try to program a game I had in mind for quite some time. I'm originally a web developper, and have a pretty good knowledge in java so I naturally choosed this language, ignoring all the "java is slow !!" I was hearing here and there And so I naturally discovered this forum, which in turn made me discover LWJGL. Then I had no doubt that I would be able to do what I had in mind with java.

I started this project in october 2011, with zero knowledge in opengl. I had a previous little game experience 10 years ago using C and directX ( the game was a brick breaker .. ) but I was a very beginner in programming at this time (during my studies ...).

Ok, enough bla bla, let's talk about the game ! The game I had in mind from the begining was a mix of quake3 and Alien breed ( the first ones on amiga ). I took the top down view and the 2Dness from alien breed and the FPS/multiplayer aspect from quake3. So my idea was that any player that is used to an FPS will have absolutly no difficulties to handle my gameplay. I also had the idea to implement a fog of war so that you can't see behind a wall and some dynamic lights/shadows

Looks pretty nice so far.Especially the lighting. I'm developing a somewhat similiar 2D top-down shooter as well, but still with pure Java2D.Also, my multiplayer mode is so far usable only for a LAN environment.You need some evil creatures.Keep doing.

Lethal Running - a RPG about a deadly game show held in a futuristic dysoptian society.

that helps a lot thanks it seems that some graphic cards don't support const arrays in shaders ... so I removed the const ...I just reuploaded the jar so if you have some time to try again it would be great !

I just figured out that I was disabling the error log when in debug mode ( assuming it is run in a console .. ) .. so it's normal to not have any err.log file I reuploaded the jar, now the error log is written in every cases in case of crash. Otherwise it is possible to run the jar in a console to see the exception

@Swattkidd7 : if you can try again in a console or download again the jar to have the err.log file, it would be nice, thanks

This is bad news, it means that your video card does not support opengl 3.0 and it's a prerequisite for the game to run. I'm using the frame buffer object from opengl 3.0 . I could have use the extension that is present in older versions of opengl to do this but anyway if the card doesn't support opengl 3.0, I think it will not be fast enough to run the game

For info I've been able to test successfuly on linux ( just had to change the resolution in the config.xml, otherwise it was running at desktop resolution in windowed mode )So I've edited the first post to include links to linux and mac jars

@Preston : sorry about that, maybe I will see to use the GL_EXT_framebuffer_object for the FBO, this way older video cards should be able to run the game. But anyway I'm afraid that if the video card doesn't support opengl 3.0, it will not be powerful enough to run the game at a decent frame rate. The thing is that the lighting consumes quite a lot of fill rate

But I finally skipped the soft shadows part The graphical result was enough with hard-edged shadows + a blur effect. And moreover I use the stencil buffer to handle the shadows ( as opposed to an alpha buffer for Orangy's technique ) which is way faster but forbids to have soft shadows.Here are other articles I gathered about 2d shadows, they all use more or less the same technique :

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